ALL NIGHT EMPIRES

Iktsuarpok
From the Inuit, meaning to go outside
to check if anyone is coming
and
sinningitainnartok
means to be awake all night, involuntarily

lonesome, assuredly, is kipingoyok

But there is comfort in the company of a language
that has a word
and a synonym
for ‘useful, but not entirely necessary’

When we get warm
to the idea of an actual first date
not like the last pile-
more distinct,
and sober-er-
no spontaneous darkness
and no dry-humping the change in your pocket.

I promise WE will walk as proud as any regular,
you know, pair
our place in society not just in
textbooks now

We we get to
the unavoidable ceremony, no Goddamn Whining
and no written vows- nothing that would not otherwise flow at gunpoint, sputtering
like a totalitarian lashed to a redleather chair
preserved on beta video, and tortured with the sound turned down

When we get to children
there will be unspoken agreements, compromises, flaps in pajamas
money saved for bribes and corrective surgery
and we will change their names yearly, or whenever
we replace them with kids that are more like us
or like us more

when we get to
the funeral
-finally-
I will finally be free to be myself-
but more details as situations warrant
and we won’t really need to see that far anyway

The last place I looked

was that scrap between your own eyes

a drop guttered in your latest gasp of surprise, wonder, or just

ohforfucksake.

The sound this would make

if we all started talking at once, singing
at once and moving topheavy around my ex spaces,
standing on each other’s shoulders and arguing and laughing,
ducking under the doors or lurking behind the drapery with dull eyeache and muted curse,
watching the night dwindle until the next dash to the blue bowl, every morning

noon, night as a single fragrant epistle

Putrified verse trotted out as if from colonic irrigation,
speaking our own name in novel form,
or longhanded vanities in which the principles are flattered and exaggerated
and then drowned in the small storm of the toilet
only to wake in the belly of a turd
an assembled wake, from the parts of the bifurcation
because there must be some thing in us to save us

The sound this would make

It would sound like a war
in love with it’s component battles, sentiment dulling the ulcers.
whatever.
how we still love the war

He made a tribute to himself out of a stepladder and lawn ornament
and a wilted space about which was once leafy, and was once bright
The general thrust of if was adequate in his own eye but
only the dawdlers and hangers-on would stumble up to meet it

A woman he admired did not loiter at the tribute,
But she did crush a cigarette with a canvas sneaker
while she moved her bag to the other shoulder
and pulled her chained dog closer to her
as if to tell it not to meet him in the eye-
or to even let it read the inscription:

My ideas of late like the flight of an iron pig
day-to-day speech patterns
chipping cement and leaving rust stains
and crushing the feet of passers-by;
I’ve only made this poem taller because
I haven’t the talent to make it any better

Some mad engine in the night
coughing and jumping out of it’s rust to
die in a half-dug furrow;
the balance of the dirt not planted with any other notion but
a deep new uselessness tilled in with the stones left there
like abandoned teeth fractured on a parasomniac’s stroll
or balls passed out after a night out on their own
Outpacing the slow wave sleep
even at a knuckle’s gait- at this hour it’s all even up
Dogs barking like mad because nothing is in color
rabid pastiche in orange anger
night wrung of all tone and form
salt wrung from the skin and leaving damask cyphers on your pillow
like the shorthand of murmurs tapped through a tenement wall

Night project;
Rebuild your jaw with commercial ingredients, mesh tape and mastic
fit for only occasional use, be sure to model in place as it will set quickly
test with any textural passage from Proust
or by chewing over Kierkegaard’s dried and dusty grain

Day project
recast the whole damned story in light relief and rendered fat
re-guild in its own mettle and encase in convenience tales
brought to mortality’s climax like prunes to the brink of petrification
then reconstituted in a pickling pot

For extra credit plot the period of time governing a grease moth’s travels here
and describe the flight from cheek to chin to eyelid
as subtractive essay in industrial pigment on rice paper, noting
That the moth can never escape the page, even as it’s folded into other shapes or
planes of bereavement or enlightenment and back again toward night, always.

(cicada gif by T. Nathan Mundhenk)

underwear hikes up,

pants ride down

Spring unnerved by a pale moon

In the night his hands draw up into fists and his jaw works as if there is ranting but there is no ranting or any sound except the grinding down of molars and the calcifying of joints and the dog turns around three times and lays down and sighs. His wife hears him even in her meticulous and finely timed sleep and nudges him as an aside and briefly the mechanics of his anxiety changes. To relief, perhaps; but in the morning before waking fully the struggle is on. He does not know exactly when discomfort gives way to sleep or if it ever really does. The bed itself bears exhausted witness to frights that have passed in the night. Pillows are uncased, sheets askew, damp patches untraceable to any known pressure points. His wife, an exceptional woman really, is gone, her soft buffering scent lost in the updrafts of his brooding funk. He jams his hands together and uses each to pry the other open.

Every anger now in beating appliances, walls, automobiles. He has never struck a human being but this violence is available, in gestures, in everyday pattern. Thumb opposes the hand, teeth his own clipped speech. Even showering is an abrasive melee of Fels-Naptha and a pink scrubee. He spits a pink froth of toothpaste and blood. Piping coffee is held against problem gums, mixes with the gastric acid plume etching his wisdom teeth.

He is crisscrossed by a fantastic itch as of mending bones or epidermal parasites but he has neither. He does not scratch or fidget but sits with a stale calm that is equally distracting. Luz looks at him over her coffee and says nothing. At last he scratches his head violently and watches dander and tuft waft in the available light. After a moment he says It’s no longer possible to die with a full head of hair.
She looks at him. Or with a devoted wife.
What?

Updated hair and shoes, a revivalist’s suit from 1910. A fresh clipped gardenia blossom in his lapel, put there by his wife because the irony of such flourishes always seems to amuse her. The scent of it in the warm spring morning undermining his plans; making a simple errand feel like spiteful adolescent scheming. He stops by June Ruin’s, who is storing his big National Resonator, keeping it all these years, like Guinevere, although under the stairs, and wrapped in a pea coat that smelled of Grappa and packing grease. He considers her butt on some level as she is on all fours, half in the hole of the half-closet, but is ultimately saddened. What is the point, futility on a base biological level; what’s more desolate than fulfillment?

Downtown, the inevitable. The city is saved from cliché if only by brute minutia. He has read somewhere that the future belongs to crowds but all he sees is the slinking away, the binding of encompassing ellipses of order with lapsing accountability, the restless math of chaos bringing new things into his sphere and the nagging impulse of wasting interactions altogether or at least acting on the wrong ones. He tries to prod his interest into alleyways and corner bars and furtive women but it sulls up on him, at last his expression settles into a passive hostility.

At Rootdaughter’s he buys a cigar and a newspaper and sits with August Melrose over a chessboard. August has been beating him soundly for years and gives no impression of letting up. August smokes a blue cheroot and marks every cycle of thought with a sip of Old Granddad. While he thinks Noe watches and chews his unlit Figurado, dryspits flecks of tobacco around the room. Billy, August says finally. You look like you’re already on your second roll of toiletpaper.

He feels as if his mouth opens into nothing, a big empty where there is no noise of feeling. He stretches his face, sinuses, as if to get his ear pressure just right to hear this void. He grabs both ears and stretches them. By now August has moved and is watching him. I heard your dad’s in town.
He ignores this. Who are you playing?
He nods at the passbar. Rootdaughter is leaning from the waist almost on her shoulders, her arms tucked beneath her, as if freezing. She shoots an arm out in a gesture of fend and says Queen to knight two and keeps her arm there for a while as she thinks then extracts it slowly. Her teeshirt reads Eat American! She says Billy I had to throw your dad out last night you heard it here first.
What he do?
He didn’t want to go home.
What’s wrong with that.
He can’t stay here. He said he was crashing your place.
The man’s a menace.

August is putting Rootdaughter in checkmate but she has already turned away. As Noe collects the pieces August says, What kinda game you got today paleface.
Surplus. Can we pretend it’s a challenge for you. Take some time. I’ve got nowhere to be.
August smiles. I invited Dean to jam with us some night.
What did he say? What’s he doing in town anyway?
Shit Billy he was here first. At least for a while.

I know that I hung in a windy yew tree
nine long nights,
head like a giant harvest moon
stuffed with fragrant peace
and slowing like a unwound clock; then

an apparition appeared to me, dragging
nine long limbs,

lungs full of furious and fecund words
of beauty and terror
and in all-out pissed and chambered tenor it then did

hurl nine insults of indexed vex
and cross-referenced vile

to my own regrets and misspent hours
and mistreated family
and I mistook nine settling birds for my own reprieve